An earlier discussion on Forum nearly exhausted the debate on the percentage of pre-retirement income needed in retirement. I rarely win the argument, but I press on. 
First, my argument is not replacing income, but base salary. For me base salary was around 60% of total compensation. 
Second, being able to live on say, 50% replacement is easier the higher starting Income. After all, 50% of $300,000 a year is still a hefty amount. 50% of $80,000 working income not so much. 

FROM THE COLOSSEUM in Rome to the palace at Versailles, look around Europe and you’ll find artifacts of once-great empires. What happened to them?
Each faced its own challenges, but there was also a common theme: They had poor financial management and became overburdened by debt. That’s why a recent analysis in The Wall Street Journal—titled “Will Debt Sink the American Empire?”—is worth our attention.
In 2024, the federal government’s budget deficit will come in at $1.9 trillion.

What does it take to be “rich?”  Answering that question is nearly impossible. There are as many answers as Google sites, but after trying, I have settled on being in the top 10% of income and net worth at around $200,000 per year and $2,000,000. Most people think that’s rich.
Keep in mind you can meet the net worth goal even falling short on income. 
What got me thinking about this was reading various social media sites where individuals were complaining about their inability to be wealthy and displayed strong envy over those who were.

I’VE ALWAYS ASSUMED my financial life wasn’t so different from that of others—and that made writing personal-finance articles a whole lot easier. I, too, wanted to own a home, buy the right insurance, pay for the kids’ college, and amass enough for a long and comfortable retirement.
On top of that, I wasn’t some financial minority—a highly paid executive, or a successful business owner, or the recipient of a hefty inheritance. Instead, I was like most everybody else,

On Fidelity.com, under “viewpoints.retirement,” one currently finds a post titled “Create Income That Can Last a Lifetime” (https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/income-that-can-last-lifetime). At the end of that post, there is a note on “RMDs and annuities,” which states, in part, the following:
The SECURE Act 2.0 that went into effect in January 2023 allows IRA income annuity owners the choice to aggregate their income annuity with their other IRAs for the purposes of determining their required minimum distributions. If you are 73 and older,

Note: This is the third in my Forum series of previously written pieces that I never submitted to the editor for consideration. 
AN INTERNET ARTICLE I printed out over 15 years ago set the work-life balance standard for me. The article has been relegated to the dust bin of cyber space so I can’t link to it or even identify who wrote it. The author discusses a friend who “seems to have found the ultimate sweet spot in his career.”
The friend made a comfortable living working less than 40 hours a week.

IS A 55-PLUS community for you? Do you want to spend your later years surrounded by folks just like yourself—mostly crotchety, demanding old people?
I’m joking, of course. But am I exaggerating?

My wife Connie and I made the move from our New Jersey single-family home to a nearby 55-plus community six years ago. Like the idea of a 55-plus community? Here are some factors to consider.

First, a 55-plus community requires defining. There are several types and sizes,

This is a spinoff of Dick Quinn’s excellent rants post last week.  Bill Maher does a segment at the end of his show called “New Rules”.  It occurred to me that I have some societal rules of my own.  These would be self-enforcing (no citizens’ arrests please) but I am curious what you’d add to this list:
1.You may not look at your phone while driving, ever.  Not even at a red light!  If you need to look at your phone,

CEO pay is a hot topic. Actually we mostly use the term CEO incorrectly because the controversy is about some of the CEOs in the largest 500 companies, not the universe of CEOs. There is a big difference.
I read often that CEO pay drives health insurance premiums. That CEO pay raises the cost of a hamburger, that CEO pay takes from workers pay. 
I find the perceptions people hold of the relationship between CEO compensation and prices and people amazing.

“I can’t believe that the great mass of investors are going to be satisfied with an ultimate goal of just achieving average returns.” That’s what Fidelity Investments Chairman Edward C. Johnson III told The Boston Globe in 1976, the year Jack Bogle helped launch the index-fund revolution by opening Vanguard Group’s S&P 500 fund to investors.
Since then, of course, indexing has enjoyed stupendous growth, and today investors have more money in index mutual funds than in actively managed funds.

I wrote recently about my attempts to improve my asset location. Now, I’ve even consulted an AI chatbot, Perplexity, on the subject, and it produced a surprisingly good answer—it even knew I was asking about taxes when I forgot to use the word tax in my question.
As part of the plan I wrote about, I’m preparing to buy another stock ETF for my taxable account from the proceeds of a Treasury bill maturing soon. I will sell an identical amount of a stock holding in a Traditional IRA and place the proceeds in bonds.

Several months ago, I wrote of my wife’s and my decision to simplify our financial lives by reducing our investments to the bare minimum. Our thinking is in the same vein as our editor’s, and a number of others in the HumbleDollar community, judging from my recollection of reader comments.
Now, I know that many others have a different opinion of where to place their money, and that’s okay. I’m not implying they’re wrong.

My grandmother immigrated to America from Kilkee, county Clare, Ireland.  I always wanted to learn more about her life there, but she spoke very little of it. It seems she decided to just let go of hungry Ireland and cast her lot in her new country.
Because of family struggles she had to return to Ireland, but was able to return to the land she now loved and fully embraced.  My grandmother loved patriotic poems. I offer an excerpt from her favorite;

SOME THINGS YOU HAVE to do yourself.
A 2017 study concluded that spending money on time-saving services is correlated with greater life satisfaction. A subsequent article confirmed the finding. Rich or poor, we can boost our happiness by having others do undesirable tasks.
These studies confirm what HumbleDollar readers already know: Wealth is a tool that, if used wisely, can increase our life’s satisfaction. Pay a yard service to mow the lawn.

THE OTHER DAY, WHEN my son and I were out on our daily trash pickup walk, I found a $5 bill. No one was around, so I didn’t know who dropped it. It was just lying there.
I picked it up and put it in my wallet with all my other “pocket money.” This is money I use whenever credit cards aren’t allowed. The $5 bill slipped in next to the other $5 bills.